Many children's toys are available which allow a child to build structures such as houses and the like and in effect create cities. Of the toys of this nature, one of the most common are building blocks commonly referred to as Lego.RTM.. These building blocks are best assembled on a playing surface where the child can move miniature vehicles, people and animals and rearrange the built structures.
Unfortunately children have very few supportive and convenient places to play with the above type of toys. In most households, the playing surface referred to above is constituted by a free space on a hardwood floor, an unoccupied table top or desk surface and in some instances the top of a bed. Each of these types of playing surfaces when used for play is limited and is inconvenient in some way. Moreover, these playing surfaces do not encourage or suggest directions for a child's fantasy. It is solely up to the child's imagination to transform the otherwise plain surface into one which has a varying topography and landscape.
Another disadvantage associated with these playing surfaces is that when the child is finished playing, the child's toys remain in the way.
To alleviate some of the above-mentioned problems, playing surfaces having printed presentations on which toys are to be moved have been considered. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,206,887 to Eyler et al discloses a children's toy in the form of a pad having a number of pages. Printed on one side of most of the pages in the pad are roadways while on the other pages are representations of vehicles which can be punched out from the pages. The pages with roadways printed thereon also have different locations of interest drawn on them and a legend indicating the drawn area of interest. The roadways are drawn on the sheets in a manner so that the roadway is continuous when two sheets are properly oriented and placed side by side. Although this provides a playing surface with roadways, the surface itself is relatively plain and does not resemble real terrain. In addition, the planar nature of the sheets requires an underlying support and therefore, this toy still suffers from many of the disadvantages discussed previously.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a novel playing structure having a three-dimensional playing surface which resembles real terrain more closely than prior art playing surfaces and which is changeable to allow different playing surfaces to be created.